BOSTON -- The Supreme Judicial Court released a decision on Thursday blocking Brockton Power LLC from using the city’s potable drinking water to cool a 350-megwatt gas-fired power plant it is seeking to develop on the city’s south side.

The decision “appears to preclude construction of the facility as currently proposed,” according to the Supreme Judicial Court decision.

In the original plan Brockton Power submitted to the state’s Energy Facilities Siting Board, the agency which licenses the construction of major energy infrastructure projects in Massachusetts, the developers planned to use wastewater from the city’s wastewater treatment facility to cool the plant.

However, after Brockton’s City Council denied the developer access to the city’s wastewater, Brockton Power requested permission from the siting board to change their plans to use the city’s potable drinking water in their cooling tower.

The siting board denied the request and Brockton Power appealed the decision to the Supreme Judicial Court, prompting Thursday’s ruling.

While Brockton Power argued that Brockton’s water system would be able to accommodate the large amount of drinking water the plant would need, the siting board found that the developer did not provide sufficient evidence to prove the “environmental impacts of the proposed change would be minimized consistent with the minimization of related costs” as required by law.

The city draws a majority of its drinking water from Silver Lake, and has had significant environmental impacts on the lake in the past due to the use of its water.

If built, the siting board found that the power plant’s cooling tower “would account for more than 10 percent of the city’s current water demand.”

In their appeal to the Supreme Judicial Court, Brockton Power argued that the siting board overreached in their decision and “impermissibly intruded” on the state’s Department of Environmental Protection’s “statutory and regulatory authority” by denying the change.

Brockton Power argued that the DEP had previously set up “protection factors,” which the developer’s proposed plan would have met, and that the siting board must defer to those standards.

However, in its ruling, the Supreme Judicial Court upheld the Energy Facility Siting Board’s decision, finding that the siting board did not intrude on Department of Environmental Protections jurisdiction and went on to state the siting would have “abdicated its statuary duties” if it had based its decision solely on the DEP’s determinations.